I applied for software engineer positions in multiple teams at Cloudflare back in January. I started interviewing with three of them, passed all the technical interviews/tests with one team, and even reached the final interview but was rejected in the end.

I'd like to mention that the interviewers were quite friendly and tried to make the experience as enjoyable as possible. However, there are several bad points worth mentioning. Overall, I would say the recruitment process outside of the interviews is very impersonal and chaotic. All exchanges with the recruiters are done over email, with most of them being automated/templated messages.

Now, if you're interested in multiple teams, that's where things get very inefficient. For each position you apply to, you go through completely separate recruitment processes. This means it would be the same as interviewing for two different companies; there's absolutely no coordination. Your applications might even be managed by different recruiters, which was my case.

The first step in the process is an interview with the manager of the team you're applying for. I enjoyed those, as you get to chat with them about what they are looking for, what they are working on, and so on. However, in each of those, you'll be asked the exact same screening questions, another inefficiency inherited from the point above.

I don't know if this is the case for all teams, but afterwards, I got a take-home challenge on HackerRank to complete. Again, that's one for each of the positions you've applied for. On top of that, for one of those tests, I was told they set the time limit to the maximum so I would not be stressed by it. The actual reason was that the whole test would take you much more than a few hours to complete. However, it was most likely (hopefully) an exception; the other one I did was much simpler and quicker to do (approximately 1 hour).

At that point, I reached the technical interview stage with one of the teams. They scheduled eight 45-minute interviews, just for that one team. Now, imagine if you're interviewing for multiple teams...

The role I was applying for was very diverse, so each interview was on a different area, including hardware and more low-level networking stuff. Since I have no experience in those (or barely), they were hard for me. On the other hand, I would say the software engineering-related ones were fairly easy.

As I mentioned above, the interviewers were really friendly, and I had a really good time talking to them.

A week after, I was told that I would have two more interviews. In the end, I had only one more, which was with the director of the department to talk about what I'm looking for and how I like to work. So far, I got no feedback apart from being told by that person that the team was happy with my profile.

The week after, I got an automated email saying I got rejected without any other detail, just saying that this is just 'a no for now'. I had to wait two weeks to get some more details as the recruiter was on holiday. In the end, the reason I got rejected was because something I said in the last interview in the context of my current job had been overgeneralized. I tried explaining this to the recruiter but got no answer. I am really disappointed as the rejection is solely based on this single point, and they did not even try to double-check with me that it was actually correct.

While I was waiting for the details from the recruiter, I considered doing the third take-home test for that other team. But given how much time I invested in this and the low amount of feedback, I no longer think I'll be applying for Cloudflare any time soon. I am really disappointed; I was expecting much better from that company.

I signed an NDA, so I can't tell.